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Professor of Philosophy, San Francisco State University. My appreciation is due Dean Nancy McDermid, San Francisco State University, for her wisdom and support. I also owe Mary Rorty and Iris Marion Young a great debt for their encouragement of this work.
In many areas ... we confront historical practices giving particular significance to traits of difference .... The right to be treated as an individual ignores ... group membership; the right to object to ... group membership reinvokes the trait that carries the negative meanings .... Why do we encounter this dilemma about how to redress the negative consequences of difference without reenacting it? 1
1. MARTHA MINOW, MAKING ALL THE DIFFERENCE: INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND AMERICAN LAW 47-48 (1990). A group that is so characterized by involuntary traits is said to be "discrete and insular." See United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144, 152-53 n.4 (1938).
I. INTRODUCTION
"Because women's situations are so various and the forms of oppression we suffer are usually multiple, most feminist issues are inextricably involved with questions of ... justice and ... bias," 2 writes feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar in describing the impetus for feminist social ethics. Following Jaggar, the immediate purpose of this essay is to explore how certain questions of bias and justice play out when women are situated so as to be identified as disabled. But the essay reflects a larger ambition as well, namely, to see how feminist thinking can be empowered to expunge bias against, and promote justice for, women with disabilities.
2. Alison Jaggar, Introduction to LIVING WITH CONTRADICTIONS: CONTROVERSIES IN FEMINIST SOCIAL ETHICS 1, 11 (Alison Jaggar ed., 1994).
To both the narrower and the larger end, I will consider how feminist identity strategy, which has been liberatory for the typical or "normal" woman, responds to the bias that the general culture visits on women with disabilities. And I will ask how feminist liberatory theory should address the unjust curtailment of opportunity which is a commonplace experience for those women with disabilities who strive for "normal" social participation. Juxtaposed, these two lines of inquiry will indicate how identity strategy restricts, but how a disability perspective can further, feminist liberatory theory.
Over the past quarter-century, a new perspective on disability has...